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9 Great Reasons to Use WordPress

There are plenty of great tools and platforms out there that make creating and designing a website easier and faster. One of the most popular and powerful frameworks worldwide is WordPress. It makes building web pages from scratch incredibly simple and quick – for anyone, even without any programming skills. In this post I’ll share with you 9 great reasons to use WordPress for web development.

Whether you’re looking to launch a website for your business or perhaps create a page for your blog online, this post is for you. If you’re interested in web development and not familiar with WordPress yet, read on!

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system (or CMS) first released in 2003 as a platform for blogging. Since then, it has grown into an incredibly powerful and customisable CMS for creating websites of pretty much any kind.

In fact, WordPress powers over 25% of the top 10 million websites around the world as we speak! Moreover, it’s the single most popular CMS in the market, with a staggering market share of almost 60%.

But why it is that it’s become such a big player in the market? What makes it so awesome?

There are plenty of reasons why WordPress speaks to such a vast, diverse market. Simply put, it offers an efficient framework for several different types of website projects, such as:

a blog

a news page

a company website

a discussion forum

a personal homepage

a social medium

So whether you’re looking for a solution for creating a personal resume page or a highly sophisticated corporate website, WordPress offers you the tools you need to make it happen. It will adapt to your needs and give you a free hand to be as creative as you like.

Why is it so popular?

WordPress has countless of awesome features that make it so insanely popular.

To name a few of the most prominent perks it offers, here are 9 great reasons to use WordPress for web development:

1 – WordPress saves you time

First and foremost, learning the basics of WordPress is easy and it makes building web pages a lot faster. It saves a lot of time compared to creating a website from scratch by using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, for instance – let alone compared to the time you would spend learning them first!

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As a content management system (CMS), WordPress offers a significant boost to efficiency for getting a website on its feet quickly. It basically acts like a control panel and a solid framework for developing and managing the content and the styling of a website project.

So, instead of starting with small steps and the very basics of programming a website, you can take jumping leaps with WordPress and be able to launch your web page surprisingly quickly.

2 – WordPress is very easy to use

With WordPress, you don’t necessarily have to know anything about programming or write a single line of code yourself. The framework takes care of that for you.

Hence, it’s unbelievably easy to set up even for anyone who’s got zero experience with web development. If you’re having trouble along the first steps of getting WordPress to work, feel free to send me a message or write a comment below and we’ll sort it out together!

3 – WordPress is free to use

That’s right! You’re free to use WordPress and all the awesome tools it offers without spending a dime. It’s a free open-source project, with thousands of people working on it and improving its features and functionalities.

Because of the zero initial cost, WordPress is a great choice for anyone who’s not able or willing to make a big investment in launching a website, such as:

Small businesses

Private individuals

Bloggers and writers

Non-profit organisations

And in case the future brings with it a more liberal budget, WordPress has a plethora of different customisation options that do come with a price tag. Paying for a theme might be a good idea when your website needs more advanced features and tools for customisation. The developers of paid themes and plugins simply have more resources to allocate into supporting and helping out their users when needed.

4 – WordPress is highly customisable

When it comes to creating a website from scratch, the look and feel of the site is just as important as its functionalities. With WordPress, you’ll have nearly unlimited possibilities to customise every visual and functional aspect of your web page.

Everything from the layout of the individual page sections, navigation elements, or the content of the pages to the colors, fonts, images, backgrounds, and much more is all yours to style and design.

You can change the look of your website by activating a new theme in the blink of an eye. There are hundreds of free ready-to-use themes that let you determine how the website looks with just a couple of clicks.

But what if you get the feeling it wasn’t the right choice after all to choose a new theme? No worries! Reverting all changes is, of course, just as easy!

In addition to the styling options offered by the different themes, you can also add new functionalities and features to your website with various plugins. There are hundreds of popular plugins to choose from for various purposes, such as:

When you’re launching a website, you surely want to attract visitors and relevant traffic to your page, so SEO is a major issue you should focus on.

And if SEO isn’t your forte just yet, don’t worry. There are plenty of free plugins to choose from that will help you out from day one. You can start by checking out my post on how to use Yoast for your WordPress SEO.

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6 – WordPress is responsive and mobile-friendly

Websites created with WordPress are responsive, meaning that they look good on any device you use to visit them. So, regardless of whether you’re sitting in front of your desktop or using your phone to view a web page, the layout will adjust to your screen size.

Considering that around 50% of all traffic on the Web is mobile-based these days, responsiveness is a big deal in web design and development. And the share is only growing.

7 – WordPress is scalable

My WordPress web page is a simple little project that doesn’t exactly attract massive traffic from all over the world. But how about using WordPress for a big news website that perhaps has millions of hits every day or at least on a weekly level? There are plenty of good examples of sites created with WordPress that need to work on this kind of scale, like CNN, for instance.

8 – WordPress comes with a global, supportive community

Whenever you need help with your website for some reason, anyone with skills in PHP and MySQL can lend you a hand to solve problems concerning back-end functionalities. When it comes to front-end challenges, basic knowledge in HTML and CSS alone will get you pretty far.

Since WordPress is such a widespread and popular framework on a global level, there’s a huge community out there to support you when you’re having trouble making things work then way you intended. Whatever problem you may have, it’s highly likely that someone else has struggled with it already and posted it on a forum somewhere. And if not, feel free to do so yourself!

9 – WordPress supports multiple content types

Professional-looking, easy-to-use websites contain various different sorts of content. With WordPress, you’re not limited to writing blog posts and attaching an image to them. Instead, you can enrich your visitors’ experience by adding more diverse media onto your web page.

Perhaps you’d like to add a video, or some audio? No problem! Or maybe you wish to embed some content from other platforms, like Instagram photos, Tweets, Youtube videos, or Soundcloud audio? WordPress will make it work!

Summing it all up

All in all, WordPress offers an amazing set of tools for various purposes in web development. It’s a very powerful framework for designing and building websites out of nothing quickly and easily.

Moreover, it’s popular among both beginners as well as experienced developers.

I could keep on listing more and more good reasons to use WordPress based on my experience so far – but the ones discussed above will do for now!

Of course, WordPress isn’t necessarily the optimal choice for everyone. Whenever you use a development framework in general, you’re giving up a portion of the power and control you have over the different aspects of the development process to someone else. However, looking at the statistics and the market share of WordPress in web development, this issue obviously isn’t keeping developers from using it.

Personally, I’ve been using WordPress for just a few months now and I have the feeling the journey has only just begun. With its flexibility, efficiency, and sheer power and speed, it will most likely be one of my best companions for web development in the future.

Please share your thoughts and experience with WordPress in the comments below. Also, let me know what are your favorite (or least favorite) aspects of using WordPress for creating and managing websites! And, as always, please share the post if you liked it so others can discover it too!

Toodles!

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